Orlando Police test Amazon facial-recognition software

He explained that the argument given for adopting body cameras was to make police offers more accountable for their actions.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office based in OR is using Rekognition to filter through imaging data captured by a citywide camera network and then compare it against a database of 300,000 faces.

In Orlando, meanwhile, there's a face recognition system operating in real-time already. The outlet claims the Washington County Sheriff's office, in particular, only pays between $6 and $12 a month to use Rekognition.

Amazon contends that it makes no sense to block emerging technologies exclusively on the fear of how they might be misused in future, pointing out that our "quality of life would be much worse" if we failed to capitalise on the potential benefits. As per the documents obtained by ACLU, Washington County has even signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) created by Amazon to get additional feedback about the product.

According to The Washington Post, law enforcement officials now utilizing this technology aren't breaking the bank to access it. The coalition has even written a letter to Amazon founder Jeff Bezoz asking him to "take Rekognition off the table for governments".

The organisation demanded that Amazon stop allowing governments to use Rekognition.

The letter is co-signed by a large number of organizations for civil rights, but it remains to be seen if their appeal will have any effect on Amazon's strategy for Rekognition. They also now actively market their artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition software, Rekognition, for use in police surveillance.

Foodstuffs, which includes the New World, Pak'nSave and Four Square brands, has said it uses facial recognition technology in some North Island stores, but won't say which ones. "Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm will be extremely hard to undo", writes the ACLU.

"It's a smart city, they have cameras all over the city, the authorized cameras are then streaming the data to Kinesis' video stream", Das said. British broadcaster Sky News used Rekognition to help viewers identify celebrities at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last weekend.

The artificial intelligence-powered system can analyze faces and nearly immediately run them through larger databases featuring tens of millions of faces to produce a similar result.

The ACLU expressed concern that facial recognition technology could be used to target political activists or immigrants, or to disproportionately surveil people of color in its letter and a press release.

As an example for public safety, law enforcement agencies could ask Amazon to compare surveillance video against mugshots.

The ACLU says, "People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government". In an email to the AP, the Orlando Police Department said they are "not using the technology in an investigative capacity or in any public spaces at this time". "According to its marketing materials, it views deployment by law enforcement agencies as a "common use case" for this technology", the civil rights group said.

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